The Beginning of the End

Dig Week Four has begun! Incredible. I won't say I'm ready to leave this place, but I'm ready to be heading home in a few days. Bacon cheeseburgers, pepperoni pizza, Dr. Pepper, cable TV - here I come!

The weekend was relaxing, but made for a difficult time waking up this morning. Once on site I was awake and ready for some digging - which I did...a lot of...in a short amount of time. If I had to estimate, I would say that I filled somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 buckets today, and at 25 to 30 lbs. each...well, you can do the math. We moved a lot of dirt today. Why did we move so much dirt out of hole that we should be nearly done with? I'm glad you asked!

Unfortunately our square was...not...quite...square...So, with picks in hand we straightened the wall the best that we could. The fill dirt that fell in was easy to scoop, but really put in crimp in us making real progress on the square.


As you can see, bringing down the balk (which here means the dirt surrounding the square) created quite a cloud of dust.

Continuing the trend from last week we were called away rather consistently to help move rocks out of the two other squares that are currently being worked on. Even with all of this we were still able to expose a part of what looks like a wide staircase heading downward out of our square (pictures forthcoming tomorrow).

As things begin to wind down on the dig, I can't help but wonder about the possibility of returning to this place...one can hope, right?


Archaeology is a dirty business, at least the digging part.